Even the Kepler transits have to be taken with a grain of salt: Periodic repetition of a dimming of a star could be a planet, or an unusually persistent sunspot, or variable activity, or or or. The relative motion by which they’ve backed out perturbative graviational influence of the presumed planets on each other, and a coherent heirarchy of masses: That’s suggestive that something is orbiting.

Why we need something like TPF: Very long baseline interferometers to pick out the planets from the starlight and get light off their atmospheres directly!

Still, the contents of the universe are pretty extravagant. Some sort of “dismal blandness bias” doesn’t seem to fit the experience of anything but perhaps the more dismal parts of human history. Surely nothing wrong with speculation?

I remember people coming up with reasons why planetary systems were rare-to-nonexistent before telescopes using starlight nulling starting picking up the first extrasolar far-orbiting jovians like Fomalhaut-b.

Then the “story” changed to why every extrasolar planet was going to be some gigantic frozen hydrogen world, and the only thing in the sky were protostellar or stellar objects. Even though at the time it was clearly a limitation in our instruments, not an indication of what was truly out there. The wobble-method picked up hot-jupiters: Very massive objects whose gravity perturbed the trajectory of the star in way you could pick out with spectroscopy.

I remember being rather enthusiastic about the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder mission back in the early 2000’s, and I still hope some agency somewhere manages to launch a telescope along those lines someday. Being able to directly resolve the reflected light from the planets will let us know far more about them.

The transit method started coming into heavy use in 2010-ish/2011: Kepler picked up thousands of new planets. I remember it being “common wisdom” in “hard science fiction” that there was next to no chance that planets could exist in the habitable bands of the more plentiful K and M stars (orange/red) because they are much narrower than Sol’s habitable band. Well, interestingly enough, it turns out those systems are also more densely packed, and plenty of things end up in the habitable bands of M-stars – whether they are “Earthlike” (whatever that ends up meaning in the end) who knows? The sparseness of the Solar system could be entirely accidental (Jupiter’s fault, or something), or it could be some sort of central-mass dependent Titus-Bode thing.

Anyway, it’s interesting, because prior to having any solid knowledge (to the extent we have it now!) of what was out there orbiting other stars, there were all these assumptions, and the assumptions seemed to tend towards pessimistic pictures of boring, barren, dead universes. Instead, it’s seeming more like “anything goes”.

My main reason for doubting the conclusion drawn from the data is that whatever they are detecting has been exposed to the different forms and levels of radiation generated by the explosion of a star going red giant, and then the implosion into the white dwarf we observe today.

We have absolutely no proof of what happens to matter during these cataclysmic events. Theory, yes. Proof, no. We build particle colliders to try and approach the energy of these kind of events, and are suprised and educated by the results. It seems a little rich to me to read the spectrography of elements that have been bombarded with God knows what kind of particles, baked and frozen, and extrapolate back to the planets that once orbited the original star.

Call me old and grumpy and a skeptic, but I remain very skeptical!